

#16, James Fuller, In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.
In this episode, we chat with James Fuller from Hnry.
James began his career as an application developer, before moving into technology strategy and consultancy.
After senior roles at Thomson Reuters and Deloitte, he decided to strike out on his own as a growth consultant for startups, corporate, and government clients.
It was rewarding work, but James found himself struggling with the amount of tax and financial admin involved in being self-employed.
To solve the issue, he and co-founder Claire created a simple, homemade system to automate calculating and paying self-employed taxes.
They shared their system with self-employed friends, realised that there was a market for it, and got to work improving their solution.
In 2018, James and Claire officially launched Hnry; a service designed to automatically calculate, pay, and file taxes for sole traders.
We chat about James and Claire's story and how they realised they were building a new category when their lawyer had no idea if what they were doing was legal or not.
We discuss what it is like working with IRD and contributing over 1% of NZ's total tax bills.
Hnry recently raised funding of $35m and we discussed how this happened and where the money will be spent.
We really enjoyed this chat with James and hope you do also.
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